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SEM With Content, Not Advertising
By Israel Rothman
Expert Author
Article Date: 2007-06-12
Nobody cares that you are the top in your industry, how much you sell, how much you make, or what a nice face you have.
People are looking for inventory (cars, real estate, clothing, books, investments) and/or information (consumer information, statistics, demographics, pricing information, quality testing, ratings, advice). In order to be found by these shoppers, you need to be found under what they are looking for. If you provide that real content, you will have a shot at their business. Effective internet marketing and search engine placement are now about the content, not the ads.
Suppose there are 100 cards in a hat, and one of them is yours. Your chances of randomly drawing your card from the hat are one in one RSS Feed Iconhundred. If you add a card, you nearly double your chances. So how many searches do you come up under? More is better.
The Internet is made up of searchable databases linked together by service providers, search engines, directories, and networks (i.e., AOL, MSN) - and now social media communities like My Space, Active Rain, Linkedin… now most everything is findable by a specific key-word-search on Google in seconds!
The problem is too many steps. You search, you find an online mall; now you are asked to search again, or, worse, fill out a long form: they will harvest your information and sell it to the highest bidder!
PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, PPA (pay-per-action) advertising, and PPI (pay-per-impression) advertising cause an environment online which favors the lead-generators (sellers of advertising rather than products or services) over the actual content providers and end-vendors (people and companies who actually sell a product or service): they buy the advertising (banners, text ads) and sell the market back to the people who actually service it (the real vendors) removing a significant part of the profits and causing inefficiencies for the surfers (the buyers).
People want to find exactly what they are looking for in one click without further searching. Therefore, they type longer and longer key word search strings when searching as their internet savvy improves, and they ignore banners and text ads as much as possible.
To avoid the whole sorted process, niche communities now abound, where like-minded vendors and consumers can meet in a more controlled, more topic-specific or industry specific environment - often with rules to avoid spam, solicitation, and clutter: these can now be described as social media communities (and niche directories: some of these have yet to make the transition to the new WEB 2.0 standards).
The search engine proverbial hats have a hole: There are literally billions of documents going in, billions dropping out. The trick is to not only have enough cards (listed, indexed, maintained Web pages or pieces of information) in the hat, but also to keep your pages in the hats, when billions of pages are falling out of them.
Enter feeds: RSS (realy simple syndication) is the new way of feeding constantly updated, relevant information to the world in a timely fashion.
RSS feed technology ( simply a flow of updated data that can be subscribed to) allows the consumer to be empowered to get whatever information he or she wants (news, sports, weather, even ads) at will, without searching: completely turning the old advertising model upside down!
Now the best way to reach a market, is to serve it! More strategies and further explanation follow in this ten-part updated series.
Stay Tuned.
About the Author:
Israel Rothman is a very well-known Internet advertising consultant: Mr. Rothman has been a pioneer in Social Media Marketing as a method of intentional search engine placement for over 800 companies during the last ten years. He is CEO and founder of SocialMediaSystems.com LLC Search Engine Marketing Company. Israel co-authors the 3net Search Engine Marketing Blog
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